Rare Old Large Micro-mosaic of Tile-Horse- Hand Done-Signed Monogram Framed

Description

This is a "Stunning" c1900-1940 Hand Done Original, Made Of small pieces of porcelain tile in various sizes and of various colors to form a horse in stride with landscape. This is a old and "Stunning" piece. This micromosaic is signed with monogram in the lower right hand corner. It is in a black wood frame and is ready to hang! EXCELLENT CONDITION! MEASURES: Framed- 24 3/4" x 24 3/4" - Unframed- 21 1/2" x 20 1/2". PLEASE WAIT FOR INVOICE!------HISTORY: Micromosaics (or micro mosaics, micro-mosaics) are a special form of mosaic that uses unusually small mosaic pieces (tesserae) of glass, or in later Italian pieces an enamel-like material, to make small figurative images. Surviving ancient Roman mosaics include some very finely worked panels using very small tesserae, especially from Pompeii, but only from Byzantine art are there mosaic icons in micromosaic with tesserae as small as the best from the Modern period. Byzantine examples, which are very rare, were religious icons. The best known shows the Twelve Great Feasts of the Greek Orthodox Church and is in the Bargello in Florence. Another is in Rome and was crucial in developing the iconography of the Man of Sorrows in the West.
History
From the Renaissance they began to be made in Italy, reaching the height of their popularity in the mid 19th century, when Rome was the centre of production; there was a Vatican Mosaic Studio from 1576, set up to create mosaic replicas of the altarpieces in St Peter's Basilica, which were being damaged by the humid conditions of the vast and crowded interior. They were popular purchases by visitors on the Grand Tour, easily portable, and often taken home to set into an object there. Typical scenes were landscapes of Roman views, rarely of any artistic originality, and the micromosaics were small panels used to inset into furniture or onto snuffboxes and similar objects, or for jewellery. Religious subjects were copied from paintings.[ The very smallest mosaic pieces come from works from the period between the late 18th century and the end of the 19th. Fortunato Pio Castellani (1794–1865) expanded the range of subjects in his work in the "archeological style", copying Roman and Early Christian wall-mosaics. It was even imitated by porcelain painters, who painted faint lines across their work to suggest the edges of tesserae. Butterfly scales and Diatoms were also used to create tesserae, Henry Dalton (1829-1911) of Bury St Edmunds being a well known practitioner.
A distinctive feature of micromosaics is that the tesserae are usually oblong rather than square.7] The best work can achieve 3,000 to 5,000 tesserae per square inch. The best collections are in the Hermitage Museum and the Gilbert Collection in London. Asia has produced a number of contemporary examples using modern precision machinery to produce the diminutive elements.
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